Cultural adoption

September 29, 2010

I am not a big fan of the Facebook “like” button. Although the idea of a near-universal method to annotate our usage and taste of the Web is a cool idea, the way Facebook built their “like” button makes it a near-perfect trojan horse: on whatever page you may be visiting, if the button has been added, one gets tracked whether or not one performs the “like” action. In other words, this is a great way for Facebook to know pretty much all your browsing habits. Where you browsed, what you liked, and what you did not. Granted, google could already tracks all your activity through their safe browsing service but in the case of Facebook, the user profiling is much more blatant and open.

Pontificating aside, I find it absolutely fascinating that only a few months into the life of this Web construct, it seems it has already jumped medium and been adopted into a cultural icon. How else could I explain seeing it as a graffiti annotating another graffiti in my bus commute this morning?

Graffiti of the facebook “like” button in a Montreal bus

Previous/Next

In the past weeks, my team has been using a live subject for experiments. Unethical, I know, but how fun! We are basically taking the Pheromone Lab, now almost a venerable blog with a year or so in existence, and seeing how we can push it in a completely different direction: as a blog it was a very nice repository of thoughts and ideas. We knew some people were reading, but it felt like a museum in there.